1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to automating brain scanning.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
A typical brain scanning process in most hospitals starts with localizer or scout images acquired by fast MR sequences. This produces a low-resolution image indicating the patient's position within the machine. Then an operator plans a diagnostic scan sequence, which takes a longer time, from the localizer images using anatomic landmarks. However, for different hospitals, departments and operators, different anatomic landmarks may be used to plan the scanning. Even when the same anatomic landmarks are used, due to inter- and intra-operator variation, the scan can be executed in different ways, resulting in inconsistent anatomy on diagnostic images. In addition, the manual process may take several seconds, during which the patient must remain absolutely still. This is inconvenient for the patient (many of whom find the machine claustrophobic) and ties up a very expensive piece of equipment.
To standardize brain scanning, efforts have been made to automate this process by mapping a template with a pre-defined scanning plan to the current scan session. See Young et al. (Stewart Young, Daniel Bystrov, Thomas Netsch, Rene Bergmans, Arianne van Muiswinkel, Fredy Visser, Rudolf Springorum and Jurgen Gieseke “Automated planning of MRI neuro scans”, SPIE Medical Imaging 2006: Image Processing, eds J. Reinhardt, J. Pluim, Vol. 6144, pp. 1-8) and Van der Kouwe et al. (Andre J. V. van der Kouwe, Thomas Benner, Bruce Fischl, Franz Schmitt, David H. Salat, Martin Harder, A. Gregory Sorensen, and Anders M. Dale, “On-line automatic slice positioning for brain MR imaging”, NeuroImage 27, pp. 222-230, 2005), for example. While anatomic landmarks are routinely used by MR operators to align a diagnostic scan, the alignment calculated by registration based methods may deviate from the desired orientation and position, depending on the spatial relationship between the landmarks used for registration and the landmarks used for scan planning in individual anatomy.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a technique of automatic and standardized planning of brain scans.